He retired to the mountains of the west to study magic, cultivate purity of life, and engage in meditation; stedfastly declining the offers of emperors who desired him to take office.  Laotse appeared to him in a vision, and gave him a treatise in which were directions for making the ’Elixir of the Dragon and the Tiger.’  While he was brewing this, a spirit came to him and said:  “On the Pesung Mountain is a house of stone; buried beneath it are the Books of the Three Emperors (Yao, Shun, and Yu).  Get these, practise the discipline they enjoin, and you will attain the power of ascending to heaven.”  He found the Pesung Mountain; and the stone house; and dug, and discovered the books; which taught him how to fly, to leave his body at will, and to hear all sounds the most distant.  During a thousand days he disciplined himself; a goddess came to him, and taught him to walk among the stars; then he learned to cleave the seas and the mountains, and command the thunder and the winds.  He fought the king of the demons, whose hosts fled before him “leaving no trace of their departing footsteps.”  So great slaughter he wrought in that battle that, we are told, “various divinities came with eager haste to acknowledge their faults.”  In nine years he gained the power of ascending to heaven.  His last days were spent on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain; where, at the age of a hundred and twenty-three, he drank the elixir, and soared skyward in broad daylight;—­followed (I think it was he) by all the poultry in his barnyard, immortalized by the drops that fell from the cup as he drank.  He left his books of magic, and his magical sword and seal, to his descendants; but I think the Dragon-Tiger Mountain did not come into their possession until some centuries later.

I judge that the tales of the Taoist Sennin or Adepts, if told by some Chinese-enamored Lafcadio, would be about the best collection of fairy-stories in the world; they reveal a universe so deliciously nooked and crannied with bewildering possibilities:—­as indeed this our universe is;—­only not all its byways are profitable traveling.  It is all very well to cry out against superstition; but we are only half-men in the West:  we have lost the faculty of wonder and the companionship of extrahuman things.  We walk our narrow path to nowhere safely trussed up in our personal selves:  or we not so much walk at all, as lie still, chrysalissed in them:—­it may be just as well, since for lack of the quality of balance, we are about as capable of walking at ease and dignity as is a jellyfish of doing Blondin on the tight-rope.  China, in her pralaya and dearth of souls, may have fallen into the perils of her larger freedom, and some superstition rightly to be called degrading:  in our Middle Ages, when we were in pralaya, we were superstitious enough; and being unbalanced, fell into other evils too such as China never knew:  black tyrannies of dogmatism, burnings of heretics wholesale.